Priti Shah

The purpose of this project is to identify promising strategies for teaching middle and high school students to critically evaluate scientific evidence presented in everyday contexts, along with new knowledge about the factors that affect the development of robust scientific evaluation skills. Individuals must learn to distinguish between good science, bad science, and pseudoscience so that they can make well-informed decisions about health, behavior, and policy. A major goal of K-12 science...

The purpose of this project was to explore the mechanisms by which working memory improves on-task behaviors, attention, and academic outcomes for students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). ADHD affects 3-10% of children in the U.S. and isassociated with poor academic achievement. Given the prevalence and broad-rangingconsequences, improving academic achievement in children with ADHD is critical. A recent approach to intervention involves providing training in working mem...

Throughout K-12 education, science inquiry standards and curricula emphasize the importance of developing the skills needed to comprehend graphically presented data. Learning to extract relational information from graphs requires specialized processing and both conceptual and perceptual skills. At the core of this study is the process by which the visual system transforms pictorial representations into a set of relations among objects. This project will explore how students extract these rel...

Children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder often experience difficulties in academic areas. Working memory, the cognitive system that allows for the maintenance and manipulation of information, is also affected in children with the disorder. Research has demonstrated an association between performance on working memory tasks and academic skills and learning outcomes. Given the importance of working memory for scholastic achievement, there has been increased interest in developing...